Track

(Author)

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this book is to give the interested lay person an idea of the history and development of railway track. It will not make the reader an instant civil engineer, but hopefully it will answer some of the questions that an enquiring mind may ask. It is difficult to start with the first ‘railway’. How far back can one go? Wooden railways, using manpower for traction, were to be found in medieval mines. Much erudite ink has been expended, in the columns of The Railway Magazine and elsewhere, in tracing the use of guided ways for wheels back to Ancient Rome, and of guided sledges to Ancient Babylon. Such researches are usually focused on the question of the origin of the standard gauge of 4ft 8½in. The author feels that such investigations, fascinating though they undoubtedly are, are not relevant to the task in hand, and he is content to settle for the horse-operated wooden railway as a starting point.

Since track is part and parcel of the railways’ infrastructure, some space in the pages that follow is devoted to civil engineering: cuttings, embankments, bridges and tunnels. The early railway builders found that they had some novel problems to solve, and they adopted a variety of methods of approach. Not all were successful, and some structures have been replaced. But the best still stand as a memorial, not only to the vision and imagination of the engineers, but to the wielders of pick and shovel who transformed the engineers’ plans and drawings into reality.

The track had to adapt with the introduction of steam locomotives, and again as the latter became heavier and train speeds became higher. A certain amount of movement under a passing train is desirable to give an easier ride, but not movement sufficient to displace the track and cause the derailment of a following train. Ballast consisting of crushed granite proved superior to shingle from beaches, although the latter was available in limitless quantities without charge. The bull-head rail has now given way to the flat-bottomed rail, and rail sections have increased in size over the years to carry heavier loads. The wooden sleeper is only now giving way to a concrete equivalent, and welded rails have removed the once familiar ‘duddety-dun’ of the rail joints. Electric traction has arrived, and the track has had to adapt accordingly.

My attitude to electrification of track has been somewhat ambivalent. since third and fourth rail electrification directly affects the track, in particular its sleepers, I have tried to cover it in this book. But, since the overhead wires which are suspended from overhead gantries do not directly affect the track, I have, somewhat reluctantly and for reasons of space, had to omit them.

Your author’s wife, when a volunteer worker on the Talyllyn Railway, well remembers the lady who asked her if there was a Woolworth’s at Nant Gwernol!

A variety of signs have been erected beside railway tracks for the information of train crews and others, and some of these are mentioned, but I have deliberately ignored signalling. Not only would it unbalance the book, but several excellent works, covering the subject with varying degrees of technicality, are already available.

Light and narrow gauge railways scarcely need a separate mention: they have used the same concept of trackwork, merely scaled down by the use of a lighter rail section and, in the case of narrow gauge lines, shorter sleepers. In these days of steam railway preservation, the Talyllyn Railway in Wales adopted the practice of purchasing second-hand sleepers from British Railways and simply cutting them in half; other lines have probably done the same. It is, perhaps, worth spending a few words on trying to define the term ‘light railway’. This is difficult, because in defining the term the Light Railways Act also uses the expression; this is tantamount to saying that a light railway is a light railway! In practice, it means that a railway built and/or operated under the provisions of the Act is limited to a maximum speed of 25mph, and main line signalling standards do not apply. The result is that today it is possible to see lines like the Keighley & Worth Valley Light Railway (to give it its full title) operating trains with the biggest main line steam locomotives!

But in their heyday, from about 1890 to the 1930s, light railways generally were rural concerns working on a shoestring. Permanent way consisted of a single track of lightweight flat-bottomed rail spiked directly to the sleepers, and earth or gravel ballast. Weed control was negligible or non-existent, and the same could be said for maintenance. Train speeds were very low: anything faster than about 20mph would precipitate derailment. Such lines were easy prey for the motor bus and lorry. The survivors have turned to the leisure market, offering a ‘steam train’ experience. The goods trains carrying agricultural produce, once so typical of lines such as the Welshpool & Llanfair and the Kent & East Sussex, are now but a distant memory – or a photographers’ special. The preserved lines maintain their track to a vastly higher standard than the old-time ‘light railway’. Heavier rails with more sophisticated fastenings, ex-British Rail spent (and cleaned) crushed granite ballast, oiled and well-adjusted rail joints, all betoken a keen awareness of safety criteria. They are also a sign of the financial resources of a supporters’ club such as pre-war light railway managements could only envisage in their wildest dreams. The down side is that many preserved lines are truncated. The West Somerset runs from Minehead to Bishops Lideard and does not (yet) reach Taunton; the Yorkshire Dales Railway runs from Embsay to Bolton Abbey, and does not (yet) reach Skipton. Even the Talyllyn runs from Tywyn to Nant Gwernol, a point on the map well suited to the rambler and offering beautiful views but not much else to other passengers. It has been said of such lines that they run from Somewhere to the Middle of Nowhere. For the passengers of such lines, it is much better to travel hopefully than to arrive!

ONE

EARLY RAILWAYS

The origins of trackwork are, obviously, the origins of railways. Just what constitutes a railway needs to be addressed: it is here taken as a prepared way of rails to accommodate specially adapted rolling stock. The rails can be of any section (most sections, likely and unlikely, have been tried at one time or another) and the wheels can be flanged or plain. The invention of the wheel is shrouded in antiquity, but it does not take much imagination to devise a way of making a wheeled vehicle follow a pre-set path. The main application of a self-steering system was in conditions of total darkness where a man could not see to steer a truck. Such conditions existed underground, in mines.

The first railways of which there are definite records were the mining tramways of the sixteenth century, as described and illustrated by Agricola. It was quickly realised that a truck of coal running on flat wooden planks was much easier to push than one running on the rocky floor of a mine gallery. It was, however, soon found that if the truck were to be pushed along in total darkness, then some means was needed to hold it on course. The system devised consisted of arranging planks on the floor with a gap of about 6in between them, and fixing a vertical pin on the front of the trucks to engage in this gap. The truck was called a hund by the German miners, and the pin was termed a leitnagel. This system is shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. This hand-propelled truck has plain roller-type wheels, which are kept on the board ‘rails’ by the pin projecting down between them. In a mine this truck would keep to the track even when pushed along in total darkness. (Demonstration replica at the National Railway Museum, York) (Author)

Fig. 3. An example of wooden track preserved at the National Railway Museum, York. (Author)

Above ground, wooden rails were popular. The name ‘rail’ comes from rail-and-post fencing, which can still be seen in places. Wooden rails were cheap and easy to lay, repair and renew; they were soon very popular. They did, however, have one drawback: they wore out quickly. So the custom soon became widespread of laying a second, renewable, strip on the top of the ‘permanent’ rail. Where these strips were made of iron, they were known as ‘plates’ and the men who looked after them became known as ‘platelayers’ – a term still in use.

Wooden rails were often used in conjunction with wooden wheels; cast-iron wheels wore the rails out even faster. But wooden wheels tended to slip on the rails in wet weather, which made braking difficult. Slipping on wet rails is a problem also faced by modern railways.

There was once an extensive system of wooden railways in the North-East, all conveying coal from the mines to the rivers Tyne, Tees and Wear. Here the coal was loaded onto ships, either for export or for the coastal trade, principally to London. Traction on these railways was supplied by horses. All these routes were eventually relaid with iron rails, either as plateways or as edge railways, and many have been repeatedly upgraded to become main line railways.

The distance between the rails, or the track gauge, differed. In the North-East it varied between 4ft 6in and 5ft, while in Shropshire at Ironbridge in the Severn Gorge it was around 3ft. The two areas developed independently of each other, and the reasons for the two sizes are largely historical: a wooden ‘chaldron’* wagon in the North-East made a full load for a single horse, while in Shropshire it was usual for a horse to pull two or three trucks. In the North-East, the general lie of the railways was downhill, from the pits to the staithes on the river banks where the coal was loaded into ships for export. Wagons were fitted with good brakes, but these were sometimes insufficient when wooden or cast-iron wheels slipped on wet wooden rails.

Some means had to be found of keeping wheels on the plain, rectangular rails (see Fig. 3). A flange was added to the wheel. Projecting below the level of the rail top, it stopped the wheel from slipping off in one direction, and a flange on the opposite side kept it from slipping off in the other. This pre-supposed, of course, that the wheels could not slide along their axles.

Generally flanges are on the inside of the wheels, but there have been one or two isolated lines where they were on the outside. Only slightly more common was the line with flanges on both sides of the wheels. This was to accommodate simply appalling track which kept to gauge plus or minus several inches! The Nantlle Railway in North Wales was one such. Here, the track gauge was nominally 3ft 6in, but the wheels could slide along their axles to take up variations in gauge. The Nantlle was horse-operated, and lasted long enough to be closed by British Railways in the 1950s.

So far, we have considered plain rails carrying flanged wheels. A rival system developed, whereby plain wheels ran on L-shaped rails. The perceived advantage was that wagons with plain wheels could also run on the public roads. This was not really true, because the wheels were necessarily of narrow tread – about 1in – and they soon bogged down in the unmetalled roads of the times. Turnpike road operators soon laid down a minimum tread width to avoid damage to their roads’ surfaces. The narrow wheel rims are clearly shown in Fig. 6.

Pointwork presented no problem, apart from arranging that the rails did not trip up the horses pulling the wagons. The drawback to plateways was that the L-shaped rails, or plates, soon became clogged with dirt and rubbish. This did not fall off, but collected in the angle of the plates and resulted in wagons getting a very rough passage. It also reduced the hauling capacity of the horses that supplied the motive power. However, if a handful of dirt is dropped onto a modern rail, most of it will fall off. What remains will move when the rail vibrates at the approach of a train.

Fig. 6. Plateway track displayed at the National Railway Museum, York. It will be seen that the rails are quite short, with the joints supported in a cast-iron ‘chair’. (Author)

Many years ago now, your author and his wife found